Stop Treating Your Book Like an Encyclopedia

More pages won't save a bad book. And they'll kill a good one.

I was on a coaching call recently with a guy who's been grinding through writing his first book. We're talking 14 chapters deep, prologue and epilogue still to go, and he's sitting at around 55,000 words. He's a little self-conscious about it. Like maybe the book isn't big enough. Like maybe it doesn't justify the price. Like maybe readers will think it's thin.

So I asked him a simple question: when was the last time you finished a 90,000-word business book?

Silence.

That's what I thought.

The book is 55,000 words. It's got everything it needs to get the job done. It's going to hit readers like a focused punch - not a slow, sprawling beatdown that loses them somewhere around chapter 9. And that's exactly what you want.

But somehow, somewhere along the way, the writing world convinced first-time authors that more pages equals more credibility. That a fat spine on the shelf means you worked harder, thought deeper, deserved more. It doesn't. It means you padded. And readers can smell padding.

You're not writing a textbook

The instinct that gets most authors into trouble is the same instinct that gets most entrepreneurs into trouble with their products: they try to include everything they know instead of everything the reader needs.

Think about the last business book you actually read cover to cover. Was it 400 pages? Probably not. It was probably tight, punchy, something you could rip through in a weekend. The stuff you remember wasn't buried in the middle of chapter 18 - it was hammered home in the first few chapters and reinforced throughout.

Now think about the last business book you abandoned. How long was that one?

A book is not supposed to be a comprehensive record of your expertise. That's what a Wikipedia page is for. A book is supposed to change how the reader thinks or acts. That's a completely different job. And the weird truth is, the shorter book almost always does that job better than the longer one - because the reader actually finishes it.

An unfinished book has changed nobody's life.

The meal analogy that changed how I think about this

During that call, we stumbled onto this idea that I think nails it better than anything else I've heard.

The guy said: most authors think about their book like stuffing a guest at a banquet. You keep loading the plate. You keep adding courses. You prove your value by the sheer volume of what you've provided. And then your guest can't move. They're miserable. They're not grateful - they're overwhelmed.

The better analogy? A really good restaurant. A great chef doesn't stuff you until you can't take any more. They leave you satisfied. Maybe even wanting just a little more. You leave the table feeling good, not defeated. That's the standard a book should be held to.

Does the reader close the back cover feeling satisfied and ready to act? Or do they close it (or never close it, because they quit 40% through) feeling like they got buried alive in information?

If it's the latter, all those extra chapters did nothing but hurt you.

The real reason authors pad their books

Let's be honest about what's actually happening when a first-time author adds chapters they don't need. It's almost never because the reader needs more information. It's because the author is nervous.

They're nervous the book won't seem serious enough. They're nervous people will say it's too short. They're nervous that charging $19.99 for something that clocks in under 60,000 words is somehow a rip-off.

So they add chapters. They expand sections. They include every case study they've ever touched, every framework they've ever half-thought through, every tangent that might conceivably be relevant. And the book becomes a different product - heavier, more impressive-looking, harder to sell because nobody actually reads it.

Here's what that actually costs you. Your reader buys the book. They read the first three chapters. Life gets in the way. The book sits on their Kindle at 22% forever. They never get to the good stuff. They never implement the thing you actually wanted them to implement. And when someone asks them, "Hey, did you read that book?" they say, "I started it." Which is a polite way of saying no.

A reader who finishes your 55,000-word book and tells three friends is worth ten times more than a reader who buys your 90,000-word book and abandons it at the midpoint. Every single time.

What "complete" actually means

Complete doesn't mean long. Complete means the book does what it promised to do on the cover.

If you pick up a book called something like The Digital Nomad Manifesto and the promise is "here's how to build a business, get healthy, and build a dating life while living wherever you want," then complete means the reader finishes it knowing exactly what to do in each of those areas. Complete means a specific plan. It does not mean every possible thought the author has ever had about every aspect of the topic.

The guy I was coaching had built his book around three pillars - health, wealth, and relationships - with a clear day-by-day framework for each. Thirteen chapters plus a prologue and epilogue. Specific, concrete, actionable. By the end, the reader has an actual plan for what their ideal day looks like. That's the book doing its job.

That's complete.

Adding another five chapters about supplementary topics doesn't make it more complete. It makes it more exhausting. The reader already has the framework. They don't need the appendix. They need to go implement.

The prologue and epilogue problem nobody talks about

One of the things we talked about on the call was how to wrap the book up - the bookend pieces that most first-time authors either skip entirely or use to dump everything that didn't fit in the chapters.

Bad idea.

The prologue and epilogue have one job each. The prologue's job is to pull the reader in fast and make them need to keep reading. The epilogue's job is to send them off with momentum. Neither of them needs to be long. I told him: 600 to 700 words is the target. Not a thousand. Not two thousand. Just enough to open the door and then close it properly.

His prologue sets up the origin story - the moment where things had fallen apart, the decision to build the system that became the book. It works because it's specific and honest. It names the exact low point. It doesn't take 3,000 words to get there.

The epilogue wraps with where things ended up - which in his case is genuinely compelling, because the same system he was building while writing the book is the system that produced the results the book promises. That's a satisfying close. It pays off the opening. It doesn't need to be a manifesto.

Short, specific, punchy. The same rules that apply to the chapters apply to the bookends.

Why I walked away from a traditional publisher

The guy I was coaching actually pulled his previous book from a traditional publisher during this project. Not because the publisher was bad at their job - but because their demands would have damaged the book materially. They wanted changes that would have made it something different than what he actually built.

And that's a real tension traditional publishing creates. Publishers have their own incentives. They want books that fit the mold of what they've sold before. They want certain lengths, certain structures, certain chapter formats. Some of those demands are legitimate. Some of them are just institutional inertia.

When you self-publish, you control the product. You can write the book that actually does its job, not the book that checks some acquisitions editor's boxes. That's powerful. But it also means the discipline to resist padding has to come from you - because there's nobody to tell you the manuscript is done.

Self-publishing is a completely different game from traditional, and there's real leverage in knowing how to do it well. We talked about that separately and I'll be digging into this more - if you want the version I actually use, the 7-Figure Agency Blueprint covers how I've approached publishing and positioning a personal brand around a book.

The voice problem that actually does matter

There was one place I told him to keep adding - and it wasn't more content, it was authenticity.

When you're writing in a voice that isn't your native accent (in his case, he's British and the book is pitched at an American audience), the instinct is to over-correct. To scrub out every cultural reference that feels too local. But the bigger risk is sterilizing the voice until it sounds like nobody wrote it.

The real work is a targeted pass - catch the specific words and phrases that will genuinely confuse an American reader, fix those, and leave everything else alone. Because a book with a distinct voice is memorable. A book that sounds like it could have been written by anyone gets forgotten immediately. Voice is one of the things a 55,000-word book can do that a padded 90,000-word one can't - it maintains its personality all the way through.

That's the actual edit. Not a word count audit. A voice audit.

The completion rate is the only metric that matters

Here's the way I think about it, and this applies to books, email sequences, sales presentations, cold email campaigns - any piece of content you put in front of someone:

Did they get to the end?

If yes, you did your job. If no, everything after the dropout point is waste. Doesn't matter how good it is. Doesn't matter how hard you worked on it. Waste.

A 55,000-word book with a 70% completion rate produces more outcomes - more referrals, more implementation, more testimonials, more word of mouth - than a 90,000-word book with a 20% completion rate. The math on this isn't close.

The Cold Email Manifesto, my own book, is not a doorstop. It's designed to be read start to finish and applied immediately. That's why it works as a lead magnet and a credibility builder - because people actually read it. You can grab the core framework at this link if you want to see what a tight, actionable book looks like in practice.

So when is your book done?

The book is done when the reader has what they came for.

Not when you've run out of things to say. Not when you've hit an arbitrary word count. Not when you've included every case study, every framework, every piece of supporting research you've collected over the past three years.

When the reader has what they came for.

For the book I was coaching, that's: a business system that generates income while you travel, a daily health protocol, and a step-by-step framework for dating and relationships. Thirteen chapters. 55,000 words. That's the promise. That's the delivery. The book is done.

Write the prologue and epilogue short. Do the voice pass. Get it into production. Stop adding chapters.

The reader who finishes your book is the one who tells their friends. That's the only reader who matters. And they finish it because you had the discipline to stop before it stopped being useful.

Go write a better book. Not a longer one.

Want to go deeper?

If you're working on your own book, business, or lead gen system and want direct feedback - not theory, not a course, not a PDF - check out Galadon Gold. That's where this kind of real work happens. Live calls, real builds, direct access.

And if you're building the outbound side of your business while you do it, grab the Top 5 Cold Email Scripts - a free download of the exact templates I've used to book hundreds of meetings.